1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless local area networks (WLANs), and more specifically to providing extended connectivity based on wireless paths between access points of a WLAN.
2. Related Art
A Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) refers to a local area network in which nodes communicate on wireless medium. WLANs are commonly implemented in accordance with IEEE 802.11 standard, as is well known in the relevant arts.
WLANs are generally designed for stations to send or receive data packets. The data packets may be sent to other stations in the WLAN or to external machines connected, for example, via Internet. Similarly, the data may be received from other stations/machines in the form of data packets.
Stations of a WLAN typically have a short signal communication range, and accordingly WLANs contain access points (APs), which are designed to act as relay points for extending the communication range between two stations. Thus, a data packet may be forwarded by multiple APs before reaching a destination station.
However, even APs have limited signal communication range and accordingly each AP may not be able to communicate directly with all the other APs/stations of the WLAN. There is accordingly a general need to extend connectivity between APs.
WDS (Wireless Distribution System) is an example system, which allows APs to communicate with each other using wireless medium, without having to use wire-based backbone between the APs. WDS permits such connectivity while preserving the source and destination MAC addresses of frames across links between APs, as is well known in the relevant arts.
It may be desirable to provide such extended connectivity using alternative techniques more suited for corresponding environments.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.